by Nicola Marsh
It was the only explanation that made any sense; he was a third cousin who’d been dragged along to the funeral because Noah didn’t have much family.
I’d always been saddened by that but, in a way, with Mom being the way she was, I’d felt like I had no family either and it had bonded us like nothing else. We’d been like two lost souls stumbling along, surviving, becoming stronger when we coupled up.
Until the end.
Mom knocked on the door and I quickly shut down the search engine.
I was handling this my way.
“Come in.” I didn’t get up and assumed my best I’m-still-mad-as-hell-with-you-glare as she opened the door and poked her head around it.
“I made barbecue chicken nachos. Thought you might be hungry?”
As an apology, it rated way higher than any trite words. Corn chips and barbecue chicken were two of my favourite foods on the planet and she’d devised a way of combining them to make amazing nachos. It had been years since I’d tasted their spicy, salty crunchiness.
The last time was on my twelfth birthday. Before our world imploded.
“Sounds good, thanks.”
Her wavering smile made me feel guilty for a second, before I remembered her reasons for treating me like crap.
“I’ll be out in a sec.”
“Okay.” She withdrew and I quickly flipped up the search engine again, entering one name. And came up blank.
Staring at the screen in disbelief, I typed in Seth Harris again.
Nada.
That’s when I realised the guy I thought I knew wasn’t who he said he was at all.
MOM CROSSED HER arms and glowered. “I’ve got a bad feeling about you going to Broad River tomorrow.”
The maternal over-protectiveness now? Too little, too late.
“Isn’t that why you’re putting me through this? To protect me?”
Unsurprisingly, Mom’s eyes narrowed. I’d pronounced protect like she meant to torch me alive.
“Spiritual protection can help but it isn’t a guarantee against…” She shook her head and a small part of me was glad she didn’t elaborate.
I could handle investigating Sammy and a guy I trusted. The stuff Mom believed in? Sitting through her ritual was a small price to pay for not having to hear any more of her theories before I headed back to the city.
She hadn’t asked me if I’d discovered anything further and I didn’t offer any information. My photo discovery could be nothing and I didn’t want it tainting the new life I’d built. Especially if Seth being at Noah’s funeral happened to be a giant coincidence.
That’s all I needed, to go on the defensive and confront Seth, only to have the one school friend and study buddy I had turn his back on me. He already thought I was a little nuts with everything that had been going on. This might tip him over the edge. Hopefully I’d discover more in Broad River so I wouldn’t sound accusatory or suspicious when I tackled him.
Mom bustled around the kitchen, preparing goodness knew what, while I sat at the table trying to appear uninterested. I didn’t want to engage in conversation because I suspected more of the same: soul retriever, links to the dead, yada, yada, yada. But I had to admit, after her last revelation before I’d had a hissy fit and stormed into the den, curiosity burned: who was the mysterious person she’d been linked to when her supposed powers came into being and how did that relate to me?
I hated the sounds of her fossicking for Wicca paraphernalia in the cupboards as much as the heavy silence. “When did you start practising again?”
She paused mid-measure, in the middle of mixing up some foul dark green gunk that had better not be for ingesting. “Angie is the practising witch, not me.” She resumed pouring but her hand shook. “These days I only use it when necessary.”
Interested in getting to the bottom of that mysterious comment she’d dropped about being linked to someone else, I watched her carefully. “Who’d you learn all this stuff from anyway?”
Her eyes darkened with pain before she deliberately blanked her expression. “I thought you weren’t interested in this?”
“I’m not.” I studied my ragged cuticles for a moment pretending not to care. I glanced up when I thought she’d moved on, only to find her staring at me thoughtfully.
“It’s okay to crave answers even if you don’t believe,” she said—so calm, so rational, so damn logical.
I folded my arms and ignored the tingle of expectation making my heart pound. “Fine. Who influenced you and Angie?”
Into believing this soul retriever crap?
“Our mother.”
Huh? When I’d asked about grandparents as a kid, I’d been told they’d died when Mom was a toddler and foster families had raised her. Was there no end to her revelations?
“I lied to you.”
No shit.
“She disappeared when I was fifteen. Angie was twenty, so she took care of me.”
I empathised with Angie. My mom had disappeared around the time I was twelve and I’d had to take care of her too.
“What happened?”
“We don’t know.” She said it so softly I strained to hear. “She vanished, no-one knew where.”
Liar.
Mom couldn’t meet my eyes and her hands trembled so much some of the green gunk slopped over the sides of the bowl.
I could leave it alone but I had enough mysteries to solve. I didn’t need another burning a hole in my brain and taking up valuable thinking space.
“That’s not true, is it?”
Her head snapped up, her eyes wide with shock. I ploughed on, “You know what happened to her.”
She gnawed on her bottom lip, uncertainty making her look about my age, before she deliberately pushed away her concoction and slumped onto the stool at the island bench.
“Mom was a soul retriever.”
Guess I should be grateful she didn’t add, “Like you”, though she didn’t have to. The unsaid hung between us, stifling in its implications.
“When I started manifesting clairaudience in my teens, she led me through it. But when she was around, the voices…”
She shook her head, the agony contorting her face slamming into me like a thunderbolt. If I really was the same as my grandmother, then Mom had gone through that same agony every day having me around her.
It explained the shying away from me, drowning herself in alcohol, and the turnaround when I’d left. Sadly, I didn’t want to believe in any of these explanations, but a small part of me I refused to acknowledge just might be coming around.
“Angie said Mom couldn’t bear to see me like that so she left.”
“You believe her?”
A tiny frown bisected her sorrow. “Who, Angie? Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because if what you say is true, you’re the one with real links to the otherworld, and the one with links to your mom. Maybe there was more to it, but Angie didn’t want you believing anything else? Maybe she had her own agenda. Maybe she wanted to drive a similar wedge between us.”
“You don’t understand.” Her repetitive head shaking was starting to spook me as I belatedly realised that stirring up old memories mightn’t be the smartest thing to do. What if it triggered a relapse?
“Then help me to understand.”
To my relief, the head shaking stopped and some of the tension around her mouth eased. Obviously my interest meant more than I thought.
“Angeline had a gift from when she was young. Mom trained her, both of us really, but I wasn’t interested, while Angie thrived.”
Her hesitant gaze met mine and I braced for another bombshell. “I…I didn’t really believe.”
My mouth dropped open and the hint of a smile hovered on her lips.
“Guess you get that from me.”
Okay, so hearing Mom admit doubts humanised her like nothing else, but it didn’t make me identify with her. She’d grown up with a choice: knowing her mom and her sister were into the supernatural far beyo
nd witchcraft. Whereas I’d grown up thinking my mom was a lunatic and a drunk when in fact…well, there’d been extenuating circumstances.
“What you’ve just told me only proves Angie may have lied. She may have been jealous once you started, uh, hearing things, and—”
“Selene loved us. She never played favourites; she wanted what was best for her children.”
Yeah, right, that’s why she left them.
“Like I did,” she added as an afterthought, her eyes imploring me to believe. Believe in her, believe in her motivations, believe in her perceived truth.
“Did you try to find Selene?”
Considering our apparent similarities, saying my grandmother’s name for the first time should have elicited some kind of reaction. But I felt nothing beyond curiosity. No bolt of electricity or sizzle of supernatural power.
Just as it should be.
“There’s no point hunting for someone who doesn’t want to be found.” Mom’s voice sounded hollow and I’d never heard her so desolate. She obviously missed her mom. I knew the feeling.
As if waking from a coma, Mom stared at the potions in front of her and busied herself again. “When you’re ready, I’m willing to begin your training and finish what your grandmother started many years ago. Until then,” she raised the bowl of brackish liquid towards me in a silent toast, “we do things the hard way.”
With no intention of finishing anything my bizarre granny had started I suppressed a superstitious shiver and followed Mom outside to the backyard, grateful for its high fences. They’d shielded us from prying eyes in the past and would serve us well tonight. Last thing I needed was some local spying us doing…well, whatever we’d be doing by moonlight.
I hadn’t asked because I didn’t want to know, eager to get this over with so I could return to the important stuff: planning my quest for the truth in Broad River tomorrow. But as I watched her place strawberry leaves, marigold petals and elderflowers in a deep blue bowl and sprinkle rosewater over the lot, I couldn’t help but be a little intrigued.
Demeter frolicked at our feet, dodging grass stalks stirring in the breeze, as Mom opened an old wooden bench seat and took out paraphernalia I’d seen her use many moons ago—pun intended.
“Good timing,” she murmured, constructing a makeshift altar from an old tea chest in the middle of the lawn and draping it in black silk.
“For what?”
“A waning moon banishes negativity, as does a Saturday.”
Glad I can fit in with your loony lunar clock.
I watched with reluctant interest as she chalked a pentagram around the altar. Once she’d dusted off her hands, she laid her rosewater concoction and greeny-black gunk on the altar, along with a stick of frankincense incense and a row of inch-high black candles. She lit them and stood back to assess the overall effect. I had to admit, even a sceptic like me thought it looked impressive.
Demeter stopped ferreting around in the grass and took prime position at the north quarter of the circle, eyeing us both with way more intelligence than any animal I’d ever seen, bar Angie’s chinchilla.
“Ready?”
She glanced at me over the flickering flames and for the first time I felt a whisper of something slithering through me like an insidious parasite: unwanted and difficult to get rid of. Nodding, I strolled across the lawn and hovered on the outskirts of the pentagram, a non-believer on the fringe of freaking out. Not freaking out in a bad sense, just hoping my increased spidery jitters were a case of mood and effect rather than anything else.
“Enter the circle at the northern pinnacle.”
I took a tentative step into the circle, and then another, grateful when the heavens didn’t split open and lightning failed to strike me on the spot.
Nothing to it. All I had to do was stand still while she went about her business, and then I was free: free from any more of her discussions before I left, free from the ghosts of her past and free from family secrets I’d rather not know.
“Move into the centre and kneel.”
I didn’t like the concept of kneeling before her pagan altar but did as I was told, counting down the minutes until I was out of here.
She knelt on the opposite side, her face serene in the candlelight, and placed her hands palm down on the altar.
Sounds of the night surrounded us in a snug cloak: the whine of mosquitoes, the chirp of crickets and the occasional croak of a frog. Interestingly, Demeter remained silent, not even emitting a squeak, his beady brown eyes fixed steadfastly on Mom.
When Mom spoke, I resented the intrusion on the peace.
“Moon goddess, we acknowledge you, we revere you, we beseech you.”
She bowed her head.
Defiant, I didn’t. I didn’t believe in God let alone a goddess.
“We call upon your elements on earth to protect Alyssa.”
Mom picked up a handful of dirt and released it in a steady trickle onto the altar. “Earth to the north, for stability and security.”
She blew gently on a flame ’til it flickered. “Air to the east, for inspiration and good news.”
Her hands hovered over the collective flames, dispersing the skinny spires of smoke. “Fire to the south, for energy and power.”
Her index fingers dipped into the black gunk and stirred three times clockwise, then twice anticlockwise. “And water in the west to heal emotions.”
All very poetic but I wished she’d get to the main event so I could get back inside and follow up on another idea I’d had.
“With your grace, may the elements combine to protect Alyssa on her quest for the truth.” She turned her palms up and, with her eyes, indicated I place mine on top.
With a resigned sigh, I complied, the icy chill of her skin making me shiver.
“By the power of the moon goddess, as I do will, so mote it be.” Her eyes drifted shut and I glanced around, trying not to look bored.
Nothing lurked in the shadows, nothing made a sound, and that’s when I realised all the night noises from earlier had silenced. I didn’t hear any lost souls clamouring to get to me and I didn’t feel spooked. When Mom opened her eyes, slid her hands out from beneath mine and blew out the candles, I sighed with relief.
“That’s it?”
She nodded, a peaceful smile taking ten years off her face. “All done.”
She cradled the bowl in her hands and stared into the liquid, before adding, “You didn’t, uh, feel anything?”
“Beyond your cold skin? Nah.”
I could have sworn disappointment clouded her eyes before she blinked.
“Do you want me to help clean up?”
She shook her head. “Thanks, but I’m fine. You head in, I’ll be in soon.”
I didn’t need to be asked twice, and leaped to my feet so fast I almost upended the altar before I made a dash for the back door.
“Alyssa, wait.”
Uh-oh. I’d heard that tone too many times in the past to ignore it. Dread seeped through me and I shivered, wrapping my arms around my middle.
“Mom, don’t—”
“I must come with you. To Broad River. Noah’s house is where you’ll find closure and he’ll be free to move on.”
I didn’t want to look at her, I really didn’t, but this time her tone held a clarity that was new. When she’d heard voices over the last five years, she’d rambled, making little sense. The flat, eerie tone may not have changed but her lucidity made me listen despite the urge to run.
I glanced back over my shoulder and that’s when I had the greatest shock of all.
Mom appeared perfectly normal, her eyes bright, her skin radiant, the slight tilt of her head the only indication she was listening to something or someone only she could fathom. Gone were the ducked head, frantic hand wringing, pallor and sweats of the past. And the fact she could still hear voices despite appearing well scared me more than all the episodes in the past.
I could almost believe in this transparent, normal Mom
.
“Noah says you aren’t to go alone under any circumstances.”
Instantly, I went back to disbelieving. “Mom, if I’m who you say I am, why can’t I hear the voices too?”
She shook her head, her pity annoying me as much as her condescension. “Because you don’t believe. When you open your mind to who you truly are, you will hear.”
I made a scoffing sound and she frowned. “Don’t dismiss this. Noah has waited around long enough, trapped in perdition. If you cared for him as much as he cared for you, don’t you owe it to him to help him move on to a better place?”
Tears stung my eyes. I didn’t need a lecture from my mom on how much I cared for Noah. And I sure as hell didn’t need her to tell me I was the person who could help him move on.
“Mom, I can’t be who you want me to be.” I shook my head, tears sprinkling like raindrops. “I’m sorry.”
She crossed the lawn to drape an arm across my shoulders and I leaned into her, grateful for her understanding, even if I couldn’t return the sentiment.
“You will hear when you least expect it,” she said, so softly I almost didn’t catch it. “And when you do, I’ll be right there, helping you through it.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her I’d be out of here as soon as I’d sussed out Seth’s story in Broad River tomorrow.
Alone.
Too weary to discuss this any longer, I stepped back. “Thanks, I’m heading in now.”
Her despondent expression annoyed me, like I’d disappointed her in some way and I slipped into the house, heading straight for the den.
One good thing had come from her little ritual tonight. She’d been so focused on preparing for it we hadn’t talked much over dinner, and that meant I’d had loads of thinking time. That’s when I’d had a brainwave. If searching for info on Seth had come up empty, maybe I’d entered the wrong name? Noah was the link between us. Hopefully doing a search on my ex would yield better results.
Grateful I’d forgotten to shut down earlier, I sat in front of the computer and typed Noah Nash.